More than 300,000 marchers flooded the streets of New York
on Sunday in the largest climate change march in history,
vaulting the environmental threat to the top of the global
agenda.
On a day of 2,700 simultaneous climate events from
Melbourne to Manhattan, the US secretary of state, John
Kerry, reinforced the calls from the streets for action by
calling on world leaders to take the threat of climate change
as seriously as Isis or Ebola.
Organisers had called the day of protests in order to put
pressure on world leaders gathering in New York for a UN
summit on climate change on Tuesday. It will be the leaders’
first such meeting in five years.
Kerry, in remarks to foreign ministers of the 20 biggest
economies, said climate change should be at the top of the
agenda despite competition from more immediate challenges.
“While we are confronting [Isis], and we are confronting
terrorism and we are confronting Ebola, this also has an
immediacy that people have come to understand,” he said.
“There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but
the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a
prominent position on that list.”
Organisers claimed 570,000 people protested in 161 countries,
from a handful of protesters in Aleppo, Syria, to the mega-
march by 310,000 through New York City – three times as
many as the 100,000 people organisers had expected, and
easily overtaking the 80,000 who demonstrated for climate
action in Copenhagen in 2009.
In Manhattan, the noisy, hopeful cavalcade of protesters – led
by Hurricane Sandy survivors carrying placards of sunflowers
and Native Americans in traditional headdresses – took over
the streets of Midtown, juggling, singing, blowing synagogue
shofars and conch shells, whistling and beating drums, with
biodiesel-powered floats chugging along.
They hoisted a papier-mache representation of Mother Earth
and a giant parachute emblazoned with monarch butterflies,
and carried signs reading “Melt chocolate, not polar ice caps”
and “May the forest be with you”.
Leonardo di Caprio marched with Mark Ruffalo; the UN
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, marched with the former US
vice-president Al Gore. At least three Democratic members of
the Senate also joined.
“People are now much more aware in all our countries of how
important this topic is,” said the French foreign minister,
Laurent Fabius, who joined the march in Manhattan.
Upper West Side mothers pushed expensive strollers alongside
protesters carrying signs reading “angry pacifists”.
“I think it will make a difference,” said Tashina Red Hawk,
aged 10, who wore intricately beaded traditional Sioux Indian
dress, and who lives on the Rosebud reservation in South
Dakota. “But it would still be good to do all kinds of other
stuff.”
She went on: “If you don’t take care of the land, it won’t take
care of you.”
From left: French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, primatologist Jane
Goodall, former US vice-president Al Gore, New York mayor Bill de
Blasio, and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon in New York.
Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
In London, organisers said 40,000 took to the sunlit streets
and marched to the Houses of Parliament. The protest was
peaceful, although loud jeers rose up as the crowd passed both
Downing Street and the Department of Energy and Climate
Change.
In Melbourne, protesters paraded a giant puppet of the
Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott.
The People’s Climate March came two days before the US
president, Barack Obama, and about 120 other world leaders
gather for the UN meeting on climate change.
The challenge for those leaders is clear: left unchecked, the
world is on course for a 4.5C temperature rise. “For us that
means annihilation,” said Tony deBrum, the foreign minister
of the Marshall Islands.
Annual carbon dioxide emissions rose 2.5% over last year, a
new study found at the weekend. At those rates, that means
the global “carbon budget” – the amount governments can
afford to emit without triggering catastrophic change – is
likely to be used up within just 30 years.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
announced last week that June, July, and August were the
hottest months on record and that 2014 was on course to
break the record for hottest year, which was set in 2010.
But the agenda for Tuesday’s gathering is uncertain. The UN
has said repeatedly the gathering is not a negotiation. That
will take place in Lima in two months’ time, when diplomats
will enter the final stretch of long and difficult negotiations
aimed at reaching an international agreement to cut the
greenhouse gases that cause climate change, by the time they
meet in late 2015 in Paris.
The UN said it will use Tuesday’s gathering to press world
leaders to do more: to cut more carbon and, for the rich
countries, put up more cash to help poor countries cope with
climate change.
DeBrum said countries such as his, on the frontline of climate
change, needed to see concrete signs that leaders were
prepared to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and
put up the cash needed to help poor countries cope with
climate change. He said he was disappointed that leaders of
some of the biggest polluters – China, India, Canada, and
Australia – would not be at the climate summit.
Those at Sunday’s protests said their show of force could help
to get the leaders to act.
Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo at the start of the People’s Climate
March in New York. Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
“You can’t get 200 people together and not have something get
out of it. It’s going to be huge,” Ruffalo, a prominent
supporter of environmental causes, told the Guardian. “I
don’t know exactly the effect, but I promise you one, five, 10,
15 leaders are going to come out of it, and do something.
Somebody is going to want to be a hero.”
The day started in Melbourne, where demonstrators carried
their giant Abbott in protest at his repeal of the carbon price.
This time the usual call-and-response of “What do we want?
Climate action. When do we want it? Now” was revised to “10
years ago”, for a crowd that felt it had already fought this
battle.
“I’m deeply concerned about my children’s future. They are
the ones who will have to clean it up,” Victoria Marshall-
Cerins said. “Australia is now dragging its heels. From one of
the world’s leaders, we’re now going backwards. We’re
embarrassing.”
The day started in Melbourne, where demonstrators carried a giant
Tony Abbott puppet in protest at his repeal of the carbon price.
Photograph: Sydney Low/Demotix/Corbis
In London, the campaign group Avaaz, which helped organise
the event, said 40,000 people attended, although other
estimates put the crowd at 27,000. A rally was held outside
parliament, which the compere kicked off by asking the
crowd: “Who’s sick of the ice receding faster than David
Cameron’s hairline?”
The bishop of London, Richard Chartres, gave the first speech.
“We are tenants, and we must keep the Earth fit for our
children,” he said. “Climate change is a moral issue.”
The actor Emma Thompson also spoke: “Every single person
on this Earth has the power to change the world. And when
we all come together, our power becomes irresistible. Now we
must use our power to tackle the biggest threat humanity has
ever faced.”
Earlier, she told the Guardian: “Unless we’re carbon-free by
2030 the world is buggered.”
The designer Vivienne Westwood railed against capitalism in
her address: “A triad of [fossil fuel] monopolies, banks and
politicians are ruining the planet. If runaway climate change
kicks in then within a generation there will be very little
habitable on the planet and the suffering will be
unimaginable.”
Alice Hooker-Stroud, a scientist from the Centre for
Alternative Technology in Wales, used the platform to argue
that a zero-carbon Britain was attainable with existing energy
technologies. “We have huge renewable energy resources in
the UK,” she said. “Business as usual is not a possible future.”
In the crowd, Victoria Bamford, a 66-year old gardener from
Wales, had left her home at 6am to reach the capital in time.
“We are on a knife edge now in every way,” she said. She
had noticed changes in the climate in her work.
“You cannot rely on the seasons any more, and plants are
getting stressed and ill,” she said. “I’m no bloody expert, but
we have to tackle the fossil fuel business, but I don’t think the
government is doing anything.”
Emma Thompson and John Sauven from Greenpeace join an
estimated 40,000 people (and polar bears) marching through London.
Photograph: John Cobb/AP
Nearby, 10-year-old Lauren [her mother declined to give her
surname] from Oxford, was carrying a colourful homemade
banner which declared: “Tick tock climate clock – stop climate
change now.”
The gay rights activist Peter Tatchell told the Guardian:
“Climate change is a global emergency – governments
governments must act soon.”
Ben Phillips, the campaigns director of the charity Oxfam,
explained why his organisation took part: “In the past five
years alone, that’s since the last time leaders met to discuss
climate change, 112,000 lives have been lost, 650 million
people have been affected by climate-change related disasters
and half a trillion dollars has been lost.”
He said the march was about keeping the pressure up on
politicians. “If you ask the suffragettes, the civil rights
movement or the India freedom movement just 10 years in,
20 years in, ‘what have you achieved?’, they’d say: ‘Well we’ll
keep on fighting until we win’, and so will we.”
Numerous marchers wore costumes, including a polar bear
and small herd of gazelles. One of the latter, Merlin from
Brighton, said: “People are important, but animals are vital as
well. We are here representing all the animals not here
today.”
The London march ended with a minute of silent reflection,
followed by loud cheers.
A climate protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask holds a banner
reading: ‘World leaders act!’ on the République statue in Paris.
Photograph: François Guillot/AFP/Getty Images
In Paris, organisers said 25,000 people attended – heavy with
the knowledge that history would be made on climate, one
way or another, in the city in a year’s time. Police put the
attendance at 8,000.
An Avaaz campaigner, Pascal Vollenwieder, said the global
action was designed to restore the sense of momentum at the
beginning of a year-long campaign leading up to the Paris
conference.
“This is just the starting point,” he said. “After Copenhagen,
we had to show the people that there is still a climate
movement.”
on Sunday in the largest climate change march in history,
vaulting the environmental threat to the top of the global
agenda.
On a day of 2,700 simultaneous climate events from
Melbourne to Manhattan, the US secretary of state, John
Kerry, reinforced the calls from the streets for action by
calling on world leaders to take the threat of climate change
as seriously as Isis or Ebola.
Organisers had called the day of protests in order to put
pressure on world leaders gathering in New York for a UN
summit on climate change on Tuesday. It will be the leaders’
first such meeting in five years.
Kerry, in remarks to foreign ministers of the 20 biggest
economies, said climate change should be at the top of the
agenda despite competition from more immediate challenges.
“While we are confronting [Isis], and we are confronting
terrorism and we are confronting Ebola, this also has an
immediacy that people have come to understand,” he said.
“There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but
the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a
prominent position on that list.”
Organisers claimed 570,000 people protested in 161 countries,
from a handful of protesters in Aleppo, Syria, to the mega-
march by 310,000 through New York City – three times as
many as the 100,000 people organisers had expected, and
easily overtaking the 80,000 who demonstrated for climate
action in Copenhagen in 2009.
In Manhattan, the noisy, hopeful cavalcade of protesters – led
by Hurricane Sandy survivors carrying placards of sunflowers
and Native Americans in traditional headdresses – took over
the streets of Midtown, juggling, singing, blowing synagogue
shofars and conch shells, whistling and beating drums, with
biodiesel-powered floats chugging along.
They hoisted a papier-mache representation of Mother Earth
and a giant parachute emblazoned with monarch butterflies,
and carried signs reading “Melt chocolate, not polar ice caps”
and “May the forest be with you”.
Leonardo di Caprio marched with Mark Ruffalo; the UN
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, marched with the former US
vice-president Al Gore. At least three Democratic members of
the Senate also joined.
“People are now much more aware in all our countries of how
important this topic is,” said the French foreign minister,
Laurent Fabius, who joined the march in Manhattan.
Upper West Side mothers pushed expensive strollers alongside
protesters carrying signs reading “angry pacifists”.
“I think it will make a difference,” said Tashina Red Hawk,
aged 10, who wore intricately beaded traditional Sioux Indian
dress, and who lives on the Rosebud reservation in South
Dakota. “But it would still be good to do all kinds of other
stuff.”
She went on: “If you don’t take care of the land, it won’t take
care of you.”
From left: French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, primatologist Jane
Goodall, former US vice-president Al Gore, New York mayor Bill de
Blasio, and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon in New York.
Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
In London, organisers said 40,000 took to the sunlit streets
and marched to the Houses of Parliament. The protest was
peaceful, although loud jeers rose up as the crowd passed both
Downing Street and the Department of Energy and Climate
Change.
In Melbourne, protesters paraded a giant puppet of the
Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott.
The People’s Climate March came two days before the US
president, Barack Obama, and about 120 other world leaders
gather for the UN meeting on climate change.
The challenge for those leaders is clear: left unchecked, the
world is on course for a 4.5C temperature rise. “For us that
means annihilation,” said Tony deBrum, the foreign minister
of the Marshall Islands.
Annual carbon dioxide emissions rose 2.5% over last year, a
new study found at the weekend. At those rates, that means
the global “carbon budget” – the amount governments can
afford to emit without triggering catastrophic change – is
likely to be used up within just 30 years.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
announced last week that June, July, and August were the
hottest months on record and that 2014 was on course to
break the record for hottest year, which was set in 2010.
But the agenda for Tuesday’s gathering is uncertain. The UN
has said repeatedly the gathering is not a negotiation. That
will take place in Lima in two months’ time, when diplomats
will enter the final stretch of long and difficult negotiations
aimed at reaching an international agreement to cut the
greenhouse gases that cause climate change, by the time they
meet in late 2015 in Paris.
The UN said it will use Tuesday’s gathering to press world
leaders to do more: to cut more carbon and, for the rich
countries, put up more cash to help poor countries cope with
climate change.
DeBrum said countries such as his, on the frontline of climate
change, needed to see concrete signs that leaders were
prepared to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and
put up the cash needed to help poor countries cope with
climate change. He said he was disappointed that leaders of
some of the biggest polluters – China, India, Canada, and
Australia – would not be at the climate summit.
Those at Sunday’s protests said their show of force could help
to get the leaders to act.
Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo at the start of the People’s Climate
March in New York. Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
“You can’t get 200 people together and not have something get
out of it. It’s going to be huge,” Ruffalo, a prominent
supporter of environmental causes, told the Guardian. “I
don’t know exactly the effect, but I promise you one, five, 10,
15 leaders are going to come out of it, and do something.
Somebody is going to want to be a hero.”
The day started in Melbourne, where demonstrators carried
their giant Abbott in protest at his repeal of the carbon price.
This time the usual call-and-response of “What do we want?
Climate action. When do we want it? Now” was revised to “10
years ago”, for a crowd that felt it had already fought this
battle.
“I’m deeply concerned about my children’s future. They are
the ones who will have to clean it up,” Victoria Marshall-
Cerins said. “Australia is now dragging its heels. From one of
the world’s leaders, we’re now going backwards. We’re
embarrassing.”
The day started in Melbourne, where demonstrators carried a giant
Tony Abbott puppet in protest at his repeal of the carbon price.
Photograph: Sydney Low/Demotix/Corbis
In London, the campaign group Avaaz, which helped organise
the event, said 40,000 people attended, although other
estimates put the crowd at 27,000. A rally was held outside
parliament, which the compere kicked off by asking the
crowd: “Who’s sick of the ice receding faster than David
Cameron’s hairline?”
The bishop of London, Richard Chartres, gave the first speech.
“We are tenants, and we must keep the Earth fit for our
children,” he said. “Climate change is a moral issue.”
The actor Emma Thompson also spoke: “Every single person
on this Earth has the power to change the world. And when
we all come together, our power becomes irresistible. Now we
must use our power to tackle the biggest threat humanity has
ever faced.”
Earlier, she told the Guardian: “Unless we’re carbon-free by
2030 the world is buggered.”
The designer Vivienne Westwood railed against capitalism in
her address: “A triad of [fossil fuel] monopolies, banks and
politicians are ruining the planet. If runaway climate change
kicks in then within a generation there will be very little
habitable on the planet and the suffering will be
unimaginable.”
Alice Hooker-Stroud, a scientist from the Centre for
Alternative Technology in Wales, used the platform to argue
that a zero-carbon Britain was attainable with existing energy
technologies. “We have huge renewable energy resources in
the UK,” she said. “Business as usual is not a possible future.”
In the crowd, Victoria Bamford, a 66-year old gardener from
Wales, had left her home at 6am to reach the capital in time.
“We are on a knife edge now in every way,” she said. She
had noticed changes in the climate in her work.
“You cannot rely on the seasons any more, and plants are
getting stressed and ill,” she said. “I’m no bloody expert, but
we have to tackle the fossil fuel business, but I don’t think the
government is doing anything.”
Emma Thompson and John Sauven from Greenpeace join an
estimated 40,000 people (and polar bears) marching through London.
Photograph: John Cobb/AP
Nearby, 10-year-old Lauren [her mother declined to give her
surname] from Oxford, was carrying a colourful homemade
banner which declared: “Tick tock climate clock – stop climate
change now.”
The gay rights activist Peter Tatchell told the Guardian:
“Climate change is a global emergency – governments
governments must act soon.”
Ben Phillips, the campaigns director of the charity Oxfam,
explained why his organisation took part: “In the past five
years alone, that’s since the last time leaders met to discuss
climate change, 112,000 lives have been lost, 650 million
people have been affected by climate-change related disasters
and half a trillion dollars has been lost.”
He said the march was about keeping the pressure up on
politicians. “If you ask the suffragettes, the civil rights
movement or the India freedom movement just 10 years in,
20 years in, ‘what have you achieved?’, they’d say: ‘Well we’ll
keep on fighting until we win’, and so will we.”
Numerous marchers wore costumes, including a polar bear
and small herd of gazelles. One of the latter, Merlin from
Brighton, said: “People are important, but animals are vital as
well. We are here representing all the animals not here
today.”
The London march ended with a minute of silent reflection,
followed by loud cheers.
A climate protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask holds a banner
reading: ‘World leaders act!’ on the République statue in Paris.
Photograph: François Guillot/AFP/Getty Images
In Paris, organisers said 25,000 people attended – heavy with
the knowledge that history would be made on climate, one
way or another, in the city in a year’s time. Police put the
attendance at 8,000.
An Avaaz campaigner, Pascal Vollenwieder, said the global
action was designed to restore the sense of momentum at the
beginning of a year-long campaign leading up to the Paris
conference.
“This is just the starting point,” he said. “After Copenhagen,
we had to show the people that there is still a climate
movement.”
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